Working Through the Pain of Paper Clean ups

Last week’s post focused on the potential pain of cleaning up old, orphaned, and abandoned paper files. This week, I’ll break down some strategies to work through the process.

First step is getting your supplies ready so there won’t be delays, or barriers, when you process the paper. If you plan on keeping some, or all, of the paper, prepare for that. Assemble file folders, labels, pens, stapler, paper clips, etc. Make sure you have a box, or file cabinet ready, to store the folders. If you plan on destroying some, or all, of the paper, have a shredder, or fireplace, handy.

I always like to start the process by sorting “like with like.” Before sorting, I set up bags for shred, garbage, and recycling. The keep stuff usually ends up in separate piles for filing. For example, all household bills go in piles, sorted by service type and dates. All health-related stuff in another pile. Even with something as straight forward as this, I still end up with a pile of stuff that remains homeless. Weird odds and ends that just don’t seem to fit anywhere, that I can’t part with.

One tricky part about paper is knowing if you already have an electronic version. I’m confident any tax documents I find from 2017 on are electronic. I submit everything electronically to my accountant, so I know it’s been scanned. These I put in the shred pile.

Many common household bills are now only available electronically. However, some online accounts won’t retain household bills older than 1-2 years. In some cases, it may be useful to retain older ones, either in paper, or electronically, for tax purposes or analysis. This is up to you to decide how far back the information is relevant.

Set realistic limits for yourself. Aim to work in short sprints, such as 10 – 20 minutes daily. Or challenge yourself to get through a certain amount of the pile (e.g., 5 file folders, half a drawer, 2 inches of loose paper). The point is, if doing the whole thing in one sitting is a barrier, find ways to chunk it up into something that feels more manageable. Acknowledging your effort and rewarding yourself is important, too.

And if all this is too much, accept the risks and invest in a good quality shredder. Or (safely) start a small fire.

Painful Paper Clean ups

The instant change to virtual workplaces, accompanying the pandemic’s early days, left many abandoned, full filing cabinets. As the “stay home” order turned from months and eventually years, people discovered other paper-free ways of working. Methods to electronically sign documents became the norm. Often business cases for these products got expedited and prioritized.

After a slow, start and stop return to the office, people started working in person again. Often the new work arrangement was hybrid, some combination of in-person days and virtual. Many people stopped relying on paper and printouts, mostly because they had learned to work a different way out of necessity. The pandemic was a giant and instant disrupter. It impacted habits and changed them, seemingly overnight.

People returned to the offices, but the filing cabinets stuck around, unused. Relics of a former workplace, recent, but still wildly outdated. Encapsulated time bombs of a previous era, frozen in time. Work resumed in a new way, carried out electronically almost 100% of the time. And yet, the cabinets remained, an afterthought, a burden to sort through and deal with, fading into the background as part of scenery. Until the time arrives to clean them up. This is where the challenges begin.

Whenever this scenario arises, I find most people are resistant to sorting through the records properly to action them. Rather, most people would prefer to make the “mess” go away by either throwing everything in the shred bin, or placing it in a box to ship somewhere else. This way it can be “cleaned up” all while conveniently becoming somebody else’s problem to deal with later. I always liken this scenario to people moving.

When people move, I think we all have a high aspiration of only moving what we need. We don’t want to take junk with us. Yet, we somehow end up with boxes (bags, drawers, etc.) filled with things that we don’t really need and will “get to later.” This is the stuff that ends up piled up in garages, inaccessible shelves in closets, attics, etc. Basically, we always choose storage places where the stuff ends up with damage such as mold, vermin, drying out, etc. This may be subconsciously intentional, but it makes the future decision easier.

However, with records the risk is different. Taking the time to clean them up right the first time is the best strategy to avoid future problems.

The Fragility of Ereaders

The debate between paper books and ereaders continues! Every time I think I’m swaying one way, I get a pull in the other direction. Most recently, a weird update and some slight ereader malfunctions created a fresh longing for paper books.

Some time ago the Overdrive option disappeared from my ereader Settings options. The Overdrive option is what allows me to login to my public library and borrow ebooks. This wasn’t a big deal because somehow my home library login remained. I was still able to borrow and download books for this system without issue. However, sometimes I borrow an ebook from a partner library that I would also like to access on my ereader. This is when troubles arise. Since the option wasn’t showing up on my ereader, my alternative is to read on my phone, which I don’t enjoy very much.

I finally contacted the company for some assistance. Turns out I needed to update my credit card information before the option to borrow books from the public library would appear. It seemed strange, some kind of weird arrangement that only after the commitment to pay was sealed would the option to borrow be released. To date, since I started using ereaders around 2010, I’ve purchased exactly one book. I only purchased it because I needed to read it right away and it wasn’t available in the libraries yet.

With the Overdrive option reappearing, I logged in to the partner library and got the new book. Shortly after, the ereader started acting funky. The screen had a wonky display, the book cover with text appearing under it. Then it got dropped on the floor. Incidentally, this is how one of my previous ereaders died. After some tense moments of restarting, powering down, recharging, and hard wishing, the ereader started working again. However, it left me feeling a bit irritated with the technology. Paper books just don’t experience these kinds of failures.

I’ve never had a problem opening a book, unless it was super old and fragile. Turning pages is easy, no accidentally skipping ahead or back random pages, or not being able to turn them at all. More importantly, paper books are always “on.” They don’t require charging or restarting. All you need is some light and a comfy seat.

I still like the ereader, but I’m glad to have paper books around as a permanent backup option.

Grandmas Know Best

A friend of mine, trapped at home with her kid due to extreme weather conditions, decided to apply “grandma” wisdom. She had to get creative with what was in the kitchen. This way she wouldn’t have to go out in the bad weather. First, she whipped up some tasty looking banana fritters, even improvising for a few ingredients she didn’t have. This is similar to something our grandmas would have done.

She sent me the recipe. I’m excited to try it! However, I couldn’t help but feel that we lose out on some of this “grandma” wisdom with the convenience of the internet. When I was growing up, if we didn’t know something, we had to ask someone. Or, go to the library and look it up in a reference book. Now, even if you ask someone, the internet is bound to provide alternative viewpoints in the form of misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, generative AI hallucinations, mixed in with a few things that may be accurate and correct. Even if you want to figure something out, the quality of the information is questionable.

I trusted what my grandmother told me. I believed the things she said. My grandmother may not have known everything, but what she didn’t know, she knew how to figure out. When she was growing up, she learned to be creative. Her life was full of improvisation and working with what was available.

I have many fond memories of my grandmother, especially cooking with her. I recall sitting on the kitchen counter watching her whip up lots of different dishes from memory. One of my favorites was her apple tarts. She used to roll out (homemade) dough and cut it into squares. She placed half of a cored apple with some spices on each square. Then folded the corners in towards the middle and baked them. She used to make little treats for us from the leftover scraps.

One of my favorite things in her kitchen was the flour drawer. A special drawer hung from the underside of a cupboard. White and funnel shaped, it had a sifter at the base, with a cover. The right side had a small crank with a small wooden ball at the end. When baking she uncapped the drawer, turned the crank and sifted directly into her measuring cup. You’re not going to find that on the internet!

AI Election

Although voting isn’t until November, the US elections have already started. Despite being American, I still feel confused by the many types of primaries and caucuses that can be held. Each State does something different, at a different time, and in a different way. This election, however, will be the first one after the introduction of ChatGPT (and related generative AI technologies) entered the world. I can’t even imagine the impact this will have.

First of all, generative AI can churn out content at a pace much faster than previous technologies. It’s unclear what quality and type of content the technology will generate. Misinformation. Disinformation. Straight up propaganda. Real information. It’s anybody’s guess and it will be incredibly be difficult to verify all the content, all the time. Fact checking will fall behind. By the time the facts are verified, the false content will already be viral.

Secondly, generative AI can create different formats. Maybe a couple years ago things like fake videos and edited photos were easy to spot. This is no longer the case. The AI technologies can now create convincing and realistic fakes. Even more alarmingly, they can do this in a short amount of time. Normally doctoring a video or a photo would take a human some time to do and require specialized software or skills. This may have been a deterrent, or at least slowed down the pace.

Thirdly, the laws haven’t been able to keep up with the pace of the technology. It’s not clear what’s allowed and the ethics around how to use this new technology haven’t been fully developed yet. All of these factors are going to result in an interesting election. With the generative AI technology still kind of new, though heavily used, it’s unclear what will happen.

All I can think is that this year, the election won’t just be about the candidates.

Computer Voices

In one of my app libraries, I have a collection of articles. One day I noticed a pop-up option to listen. “Short on time?” the pop-up advertises, choose the listen option. Sure enough, in the toolbar row on the bottom, there’s a small icon of a headset.

Normally I prefer to read these articles. They can be quite dense, sometimes requiring me to reread a passage to make sense of it. Also, there are lots of diagrams, models, and other graphs illustrating the text. Today I decided to try out the listen option while I was doing something else in the kitchen. After all, I’m a long-time podcast listener. Recently I discovered the magic of audio books. I felt excited about having these lengthy articles read to me.

About 2 minutes in, I realized this was not a good option. Unlike podcasts, who are hosted by real people, and audiobooks, read by real people and often actors, the article featured a simulated, computer voice. It was horrid. The voice had a synthetic, metallic twang to it, making it obvious that a computer was “reading” it. Everything was monotone, including all the descriptions for the many diagrams and other points. I listened for a few more minutes, trying to get into it. However, I realized I wasn’t paying attention because it sounded so boring. Admittedly, a non-fiction article might not be the most exciting content to listen to, but the computer-voice made it extra dry and lifeless.

As I shut off the audio version, in favor of something more aurally pleasing, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. There are so many great options available for audio readings. I’m sure many even sound like real people with tone, inflection, cadence, enunciation, emphasis, basically anything to make the text sound alive and real.

I realize the rise of AI, and other technological advances, raise real concerns about audio recordings. For example, AI can analyze an actor or author reading his/her own work, then replicate it for something new, without paying royalties or having permission. There are real ethics issues here. But at the same time, there must be some kind of balance between providing a reasonable sounding audio version to your customers, that doesn’t infringe on the work of artists and authors, or raise ethics concerns.

Until that library service figures out a better audio option, I’ll stick with reading those articles for now.